Typical weekend - a couple weird things but nothing tragic. For example the assimilator queue ballooned for a while, but then worked its way back down to zero on its own. There might have been mysql database load causing some general malaise like the above - no smoking guns have been found yet.

Otherwise general progress. With the servers doing well I continue to send out reminder e-mails to users who haven't returned results in a while. We consistently fight a general downward trend as people buy new computers and forget to reinstall BOINC. Looking at the recent active user graphs out there I'd say about 10% of the reminder e-mails result in a returning user. Most of them bounce (or get spam filtered). Also a large fraction of these e-mails are currently going to users who haven't sent results back in years. So I imagine the success rate will increase over time, but on the other hand I imagine we won't be sending out such mails as often in the future (the number of people who could be deemed "ready to remind" is finite).

Meanwhile I'm working on finally running the precess fixer (run into some embedded sql issues this afternoon), while Jeff is almost ready to throw the NTPCkr into beta. We actually discussed public data visualization of candidates at our general meeting this afternoon. And it sound like AstroPulse is pretty much ready for prime time as well. Woo-hoo!

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

- Matt

____________
-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Far Out!
I so can't wait!
I wonder how many new 'strange' objects will start to show up.
I'm hoping one is the signal we all seek, however... I'm sure with the amount of data that has built up, some very cool things are going to come out of this besides just finding an intellegent life off world. ( sometimes, when I look around at work, its hard to find 'intellegent life forms ;) )

Just wanted to add this.
I think you guys are doing a great job at keeping us all up to speed. I ALWAYS come to the tech thread FIRST and look for a new post on where things are and how things have been.

It sound like AstroPulse is pretty much ready for prime time as well. Woo-hoo!

This is good news. I thought that AstroPulse was a test project for new processing applications & futures before they come over here to the main project am I right in saying this? Please correct me if i'm wrong. With the current work load is it better to dedicate our pc's to this project or AstroPulse project or both? Both my pc's are crunching on this project at present.
Thanks
Speedy

Nothing really major happened today so I won't bother starting a new thread.

Had the usual Tuesday outage today. No real news there. The problems we discovered with my precess fixer (see yesterday's) note resulted in some head scratching through the end of the day yesterday and some extreme debugging this morning. By "extreme debugging" I mean me and Jeff watching as Eric teases the most arcane bits of information out of gdb. Left to my own devices I'd be still putting fprintf(stderr,"HERE") statements all over the place. In any case we found the key problem and Eric is beating his head on it now. This precess fix isn't really holding anything up but we'd like to get it done already.

Meanwhile Jeff continues beating on the NTPCkr, and last I checked in it was successfully running in daemon mode on beta. That is, a new set of results come in thus turning several sky pixels "hot" - meaning their scores need to be recalculated (better if we saw something, worse if we didn't). There's still some performance enhancements to make to ensure this runs in "near time" on the much larger public project, and the scoring algorithms have yet to be completed. Still, it's fun to see new pixels getting analyzed every few seconds, even with the output being just text to stdout.

To answer one question: AstroPulse is real, not just a test project. Note that there are projects and there are applications. Right now the SETI@home Project has one application: SETI@home. Soon it will have another: AstroPulse. So if you signed up for the SETI@home Project, you will automatically be given both kinds of workunits. We have yet to determine the ratio of SETI@home to AstroPulse work we'll be sending out.

- Matt

____________
-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

It sound like AstroPulse is pretty much ready for prime time as well. Woo-hoo!

This is good news. I thought that AstroPulse was a test project for new processing applications & futures before they come over here to the main project am I right in saying this? Please correct me if I'm wrong. With the current work load is it better to dedicate our pc's to this project or AstroPulse project or both? Both my pc's are crunching on this project at present.
Thanks
Speedy

No, SETI beta is the site for both SETI's beta and the beta of Astropulse... AP (if I may shorten it...) will eventually be a production program over here, once the bugs are worked out on the Beta site. Beta has actually shut down SETI
WU's for the moment so they can generate more AP WU's to actually get ready for production.

The only problem I have with AP (I also crunch beta...) is the size of the WU... 8Mb, the length of the WU (~75 hours for my Opteron) and (although, I hope, this gets changed b4 it goes into production...) the deadlines for the WU's (short! - and this isn't the forum to discuss that...)
____________
.

It sound like AstroPulse is pretty much ready for prime time as well. Woo-hoo!

This is good news. I thought that AstroPulse was a test project for new processing applications & futures before they come over here to the main project am I right in saying this? Please correct me if I'm wrong. With the current work load is it better to dedicate our pc's to this project or AstroPulse project or both? Both my pc's are crunching on this project at present.
Thanks
Speedy

No, SETI beta is the site for both SETI's beta and the beta of Astropulse... AP (if I may shorten it...) will eventually be a production program over here, once the bugs are worked out on the Beta site. Beta has actually shut down SETI
WU's for the moment so they can generate more AP WU's to actually get ready for production.

The only problem I have with AP (I also crunch beta...) is the size of the WU... 8Mb, the length of the WU (~75 hours for my Opteron) and (although, I hope, this gets changed b4 it goes into production...) the deadlines for the WU's (short! - and this isn't the forum to discuss that...)

... and right now, Astropulse wants 3.4 gigabytes of free disk or it won't assign work. Does it really need 3.4 gigabytes?
____________

Things like splitters which control the requirements and other things are still being developed.

Currently, Seti Beta Testing takes a lot of time and attention on the part of active volunteer testers... Telling what you saw when something went wrong is important. Then people go to work digging out reasons and information to fix the issues.

One reason that Seti Enhanced and Seti MultiBeam were as painless as they were is because of the group of Dedicated Volunteer Testers. It is one of the two ways you can earn the "Volunteer tester" tag. Seti Beta and BOINC Alpha.

So without an active recuitment drive for Testers: BOINC Alpha has published they are looking for a few good testers. 6.2.1 is about ready for prime time.
Seti Beta is working to Astropluse ready for Seti main.

There is room for more testers.
*** The cautions are, it will take some of your time. Sometimes there is a large delay (if you are in it for credits) before a Result Validates or credit might be issued... Or it will blow up in the middle of the night. Or it will blow up on installation.

Hmmmmmm choices...

Regards

Al

It sound like AstroPulse is pretty much ready for prime time as well. Woo-hoo!

This is good news. I thought that AstroPulse was a test project for new processing applications & futures before they come over here to the main project am I right in saying this? Please correct me if I'm wrong. With the current work load is it better to dedicate our pc's to this project or AstroPulse project or both? Both my pc's are crunching on this project at present.
Thanks
Speedy

No, SETI beta is the site for both SETI's beta and the beta of Astropulse... AP (if I may shorten it...) will eventually be a production program over here, once the bugs are worked out on the Beta site. Beta has actually shut down SETI
WU's for the moment so they can generate more AP WU's to actually get ready for production.

The only problem I have with AP (I also crunch beta...) is the size of the WU... 8Mb, the length of the WU (~75 hours for my Opteron) and (although, I hope, this gets changed b4 it goes into production...) the deadlines for the WU's (short! - and this isn't the forum to discuss that...)

... and right now, Astropulse wants 3.4 gigabytes of free disk or it won't assign work. Does it really need 3.4 gigabytes?

NTPCKR, is what is going to end up doing the reporting of the Science that we have been collecting for a long time. At points int time it has beeen done manually as Matt stated. It has grown to the point it becomes "which end of the elephant do you grab. Now how to flip it over..."

Regards

Al

Ok, so I know a little bit about astropulse now. What about ntpckr? How is that going to help us?

To answer one question: AstroPulse is real, not just a test project. Note that there are projects and there are applications. Right now the SETI@home Project has one application: SETI@home. Soon it will have another: AstroPulse. So if you signed up for the SETI@home Project, you will automatically be given both kinds of workunits. We have yet to determine the ratio of SETI@home to AstroPulse work we'll be sending out.

- Matt

Will automatic distribution of Astropulse take place when I am running a optimized SETI client using a app_info.xml file or do a need to make manueel changes.
____________

It sound like AstroPulse is pretty much ready for prime time as well. Woo-hoo!

This is good news. I thought that AstroPulse was a test project for new processing applications & futures before they come over here to the main project am I right in saying this? Please correct me if I'm wrong. With the current work load is it better to dedicate our pc's to this project or AstroPulse project or both? Both my pc's are crunching on this project at present.
Thanks
Speedy

No, SETI beta is the site for both SETI's beta and the beta of Astropulse... AP (if I may shorten it...) will eventually be a production program over here, once the bugs are worked out on the Beta site. Beta has actually shut down SETI
WU's for the moment so they can generate more AP WU's to actually get ready for production.

The only problem I have with AP (I also crunch beta...) is the size of the WU... 8Mb, the length of the WU (~75 hours for my Opteron) and (although, I hope, this gets changed b4 it goes into production...) the deadlines for the WU's (short! - and this isn't the forum to discuss that...)

... and right now, Astropulse wants 3.4 gigabytes of free disk or it won't assign work. Does it really need 3.4 gigabytes?

Apparently it thinks it does... whether it really does is a question that should be asked on beta, not here
____________
.

One reason that Seti Enhanced and Seti MultiBeam were as painless as they were is because of the group of Dedicated Volunteer Testers. It is one of the two ways you can earn the "Volunteer tester" tag. Seti Beta and BOINC Alpha.

... and I got my "tester" tag by participating in both.

Unfortunately, I'm not testing Astropulse because of the space requirement, and I'm not testing BOINC 6.2.x because it won't run on any of my machines.